Category Archives: editor interview

Back in April, I interviewed Joanne Merriam and Octavia Cade, two of the editors of the Women Up to No Good anthology series from Upper Rubber Boot Books. The Kickstarter to support the anthology series, which focuses on dark, feminist, speculative fiction just relaunched earlier this month. There are tons of fabulous rewards up for grab as part of the campaign, including a critique from yours truly. What’s more, you’ll be helping Upper Rubber Boot continue publishing stories with a feminist bent, and bring even more wonderful fiction into the world.

As part of the Kickstarter relaunch, Joanne and Octavia were kind enough to come back and answer some bonus questions for me. Here they are, chatting about Canadian and Kiwi literature, odd jobs, and recent favorite reads…

A question I like to ask my fellow (transplanted) Canadians (hi, Joanne!), but can apply equally to other nationalities (hi, Octavia!) is about the national character of our/their literature. So, do you think there are particular tones, themes, or subjects that make a piece of literature quintessentially of Canada or of New Zealand? If so, do you ever consciously draw on those themes in your own work, or even consciously avoid them?

JM: Yes and yes! I’d be hard-pressed to define Canadian-ness in lit (people devote their whole lives to that, as you know) but there’s definitely a “feel” to it. When I read submissions, I try to read as blind as I can, and sometimes this doesn’t work because you recognize a well-known writer’s style, but in a similar way, I’ve noticed that frequently I’ll think, “huh, I’m pretty sure a Canadian wrote this” and I’m right more often than not, although the bulk of my submissions come from Americans. But there’s such a breadth to what falls under that umbrella of Canlit that it’s really something you notice more in aggregate than in particular works. For my own work, it’s not something I generally think about but I’m sure it exerts an unconscious influence. I’ve been living in the States for 14 years now, so less and less influence over time, I expect, though Americans do still comment on my speech patterns and certain habits of mind are set by the time you’re 25 or so and I didn’t emigrate until I was 30.

OC: There’s a Kiwi actor called Sam Neill that a lot of you will probably know of, and he made a study of New Zealand cinema some time back that coined a very specific phrase. He talked about how NZ films were a “cinema of unease” – often dark and uncomfortable, reflective of the struggle for identity. And that is I think often present in our literature as well, and it’s there on both an individual and community level. We’re a young country that’s geographically isolated and relatively unimportant, so much so that for a lot of the time we’re left to do our own thing, pretty much. There’s a tongue-in-cheek campaign going round at the moment to remedy the many, many maps around the world that don’t actually have us on them, but although we laugh at it there is I think an underlying sense of national… I wouldn’t call it insecurity, exactly, although that’s part of it for sure, but a very definite awareness of isolation and the power of connection and disconnection, of existing very slightly apart, and that’s discomforting, and something we explore a lot in literature as well as cinema. When writing myself I tend to be drawn to the slightly odd and quietly grim, so I expect it’s all percolated through unawares.

Speaking of national characteristics, let’s talk about your current home towns a bit. What are your favorite places in your respective areas to gain inspiration, or refresh yourselves when you’re feeling stuck on a creative project? What are the places you like to recommend to people visiting for the first time?

OC: I live in small town Cambridge, but one of the places that really inspires me is Hamilton Public Gardens (Hamilton being the city about 20 minutes away). They were International Garden of the Year back in 2014 I think? And was originally built on the town dump. They are unreservedly excellent, split up into dozens of small connected gardens. Some of these are themed geographically – the Maori garden, the Indian garden, the Italian garden, for example – and some are totally fantastically insane. The newest one to open is a concept garden with a sunken lemon tree pit, red painted trees and a zeppelin – and they’re planning over a dozen more. Next to open, I think, and what I’ve been hanging out for, is the surrealist garden, complete with 8 metre tall giant moving topiaries. There’s also a garden based on a famous NZ short story to come, a garden where they’re building a ruined and overgrown castle, a garden based on fantasy films, an ancient Egyptian garden, one based on the medieval French poem The Romance of the Rose… they only have a few of the plans up on their website, but there’s a big display of future projects at the gardens themselves. I love public gardens at the best of times, and Hamilton’s is without doubt the best I’ve ever seen. Every time I go there – and I go there regularly – I’m inspired with what imagination can make of (literal) trash.

(ACW: OMG! Those gardens sound amazing. Now I want to visit!)

JM: I still think of my hometown as Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I miss being able to walk down to the boardwalk or drive out to Conrad’s Beach to commune with the Atlantic. Tennessee is short on ocean but long on wonderful state parks – I often go to places like Radnor Lake, Savage Gulf, and Old Stone Fort to hike to waterfalls and look at trees and turn my mind off for a bit. I find when I’m stuck, thinking harder about the issue doesn’t help me, and the best thing to do is something distracting that’s mostly physical and that gets my brain back to a sort of calm steady state, and then frequently the solution just presents itself. We also have an excellent zoo, and I like to go when they open on Saturdays, and walk straight to the elephant enclosure and watch them eat their hay while I sit and eat a protein bar. There’s one elephant who always comes over to the artificial lake by my bench to have a drink and look at me, and I feel like we’re visiting each other for breakfast, although for all I know she does that every day whether I’m there or not. The other place I’m constantly recommending to people is Cheekwood, an old mansion that was turned over to a conservancy group which has been very creative in how they use the property: the mansion is a museum with a permanent exhibit on the group floor and rotating art exhibits on the second floor, and the grounds have been turned into a series of themed gardens (similar to what Octavia describes above, but much less fantastical) plus a sculpture trail, and some additional buildings have been added for workshops and classes and quite a good restaurant. We were there last week to see an outdoor exhibit of enormous inflatable rabbits (pictured above).

Another of my favorite things to ask is about strange, non-writing jobs. What’s the most unusual job you’ve ever had? Did it inspire any of your creative work, teach you anything particular valuable, or inform your life in other ways?

JM: I haven’t had a ton of weird jobs, unlike many writers, but I do get inspiration from my work. For example, my story “Swan Song” arose from a job I had sorting Medicaid claim forms, and “Facial Deficits,” which was in [PANK], was inspired by a lecturer I met at my current job, who had been part of the team to perform the first facial allotransplantation in the US, and of course after talking to him I had to write a story about a face transplant patient because what’s more science fictional than that? Most of my work life has been as an administrative assistant, which is frequently tedious but sometimes very interesting. I worked for five years for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, and spent some time in corporate jobs, but most of my work life has been in medicine or related positions, for the Nova Scotia Department of Health, for a Medicaid contractor, and now running a surgical fellowship and the lives of several surgeons for a local hospital. I’m currently involved in a medical surgical-educational camp in Kenya, which my boss-doctor has brought me to twice, and at some point the small coastal town we go to, Malindi, will feature in some stories. Working in medicine helps me to maintain perspective about my own life: maybe money is tight or a tree fell on our roof or I can’t figure out how to resolve a plot problem or whathaveyou, but nobody died.

OC: I worked at a match-making festival in Ireland for 3 months once. I was doing the backpacking thing, and got a temp job at a hotel on the West Coast in this tiny little town of Lisdoonvarna which has less than 1K people most of the time but explodes into non-stop music and party for the duration of the festival. Completely mad. It’s never turned up in any of my stories. I’m not sure I could do it justice. I’ve also done some science writing for kids that’s basically looking up strange and disgusting facts and turning them into mildly informative articles (did you know one of the first women to discover a comet impaled herself on her own telescope? Well, one of the massive hooks needed to move it, anyway. Lost a significant chunk of flesh). Kids love that gross shit, and so do I.

Since I never tire of talking about books and short stories, and since a TBR piles can never be too towering, what are a few of your recent favorite reads? Or, old favorites you think more people ought to know about?

JM: I’ve been recommending Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera to everybody: it’s a hilarious adventure about an aging rock star who has to save the world in the universe’s answer to Eurovision. I’m also excited to read Christina Dalcher’s Vox once it comes out this August; it’s based on a short story she originally wrote for Broad Knowledge and then expanded into a novel instead, and the short story was extremely good. And finally, I would say that anybody who hasn’t read The Hate U Give needs to drop everything and do so.

OC: Oh, well, let me take the chance to plug (again!) The Swan Book by Alexis Wright. Magical realism meets cli-fi and indigenous Australia. It came out several years ago, is astonishingly good, got pretty much zero notice from the SFF review scene which should have fallen all over it, and inexplicably did not even make the long list for the Booker (which it deserved to win) and I will never stop being salty about that. Never. The language in it is extraordinary and if you haven’t read it please consider taking a look.

On a related note, what other nerdy things are you excited about at the moment – comics, tv, games, movies, music, or anything else?

OC: Nerdy things, hmm. I continue to work my way through every werewolf film ever made, on the grounds that I Have A Theory and therefore sitting on my arse and stuffing my face with popcorn while I watch the latest gross transformation scene is Research and not just being bone idle. Oh, and there’s a kickstarter someone’s working on to make handbags in the shape of whale sharks and I am enthralled. Other than that, most of my nerdiness is reserved for real life things like national parks being snarky to power over social media, and the hoarding of enraging science stories so I can work out my bile by writing grim uneasy stories where Science Fights Back and so on.

JM: I’m pretty obsessed with the Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, about a rich family who lose everything and have to move to a small town they once bought as a joke. Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara are the big names in it, and of course they’re wonderful, but the real reason I’m watching is Daniel Levy and Emily Hampshire, whose characters are so layered in irony and unhappiness it’s a real pleasure to watch them find each other. I’ve also been watching Brooklyn 99 obsessively, but I’m late to the party there. For movies, I want everybody in the world to watch The Beauty Inside, a romantic drama about a man who wakes up every day as a different person and the woman who loves him but faces social consequences for apparently being with different men all the time. I found it lovely and haunting. I’ve also taken to watching Mr. Right, where hitman Sam Rockwell falls for Anna Kendrick (and who wouldn’t), about once a month, and I’m forever telling my loved ones that I’m a dinosaur because of it. (And speaking of dinosaurs, I’m also looking forward to the kickstarter for A. Merc Rustad’s Robot Dinosaurs virtual anthology!)

Thank you for coming back to answer some bonus questions, and best of luck with the Kickstarter!

Today, I’m very pleased to welcome Joanne Merriam and Octavia Cade, two of the editors of Upper Rubber Boot’s Women Up to No Good anthology series. Women Up to No Good focuses on dark, feminist fiction by authors who identify as female, non-binary, or a marginalized sex or gender identity.

Welcome! To start things off, could you please each briefly introduce yourself?

JM: I’m Joanne Merriam, the editor of Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good, and co-editor (with H. L. Nelson) of Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good, and also the publisher at Upper Rubber Boot Books. I started my writing life as the executive assistant and office manager of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (where I’m from originally) from 1997 through 2001. At “Ma Fed,” I absorbed a very writer-focused attitude to the publishing industry, which I’ve carried into my life as a publisher. I’m also a writer, and have been published by Stride Publications (a now-defunct UK small press publisher) who put out my poetry collection The Glaze from Breaking, as well as in Asimov’s, Canadian Literature, Escape Pod, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, On Spec, PANK, Per Contra, and Strange Horizons, amongst others.

OC: Hi! I’m Octavia, I’m from New Zealand, and I am utterly consumed with cake. Well, not utterly, but close enough. Baking is a hobby that I really enjoy—everything from pies to profiteroles—and given that my favourite entertainment genre is horror the two were bound to collide eventually. Sort of by accident I fell into doing a series of columns on Food and Horror for The Book Smugglers. The collected essays were published by them last year, and it was an easy step from there to look at the possibility of editing a food horror anthology (Sharp & Sugar Tooth).

You recently launched a Kickstarter to support Women Up to No Good. I presume this means we can look forward to a new installment in the series soon? Could you tell us a bit about your vision for the next anthology, how it speaks to the previous titles in the series, and maybe a bit about where you see the series as a whole going in the future?

JM: We’re kickstarting Broad Knowledge, the second in the series, which focuses on what women know and how knowledge and wisdom overlap and entwine but aren’t the same, and Sharp & Sugar Tooth, the third, which focuses on our relationship with food and consumption. My vision for the series is that we support the voices of women and others with marginalized sex or gender identities, who we know from projects like the VIDA Count are underrepresented in publishing. I’d like to have more outside editors, and have been absolutely delighted by Octavia’s selections for Sharp & Sugar Tooth. Each anthology will have dark fiction focused on a specific subject, but otherwise they’re all self-contained.

OC: I can only speak to the anthology I’ve been an editor on, but The Sharp and Sugar Tooth is an antho about creepy food. There’s a lot of power in food, come directly from the fact that it’s a simple necessity. We literally cannot live without it, and so the preparation of food—getting the ingredients, preparing it, sharing it—is really a very powerful activity. And yet it’s so often looked down on, almost. Women’s work, kitchen chores… who’s stuck with the potato peeling and dish scrubbing and everyday management of menus, for instance. In that cultural space between “Get me a sandwich!” and “You’d starve without that bloody sandwich!” is an enormous conversation and negotiation with power. I was particularly interested, when pitching this anthology to Joanne, about how women navigated their roles as food producers and food consumers, and I think there’s a fantastic range of stories in Sugar Tooth exploring exactly that. How consumption can break you down, how it can build you up again. How you can use it to make connections with other people… it’s a fascinating thing.

As editors, I know it’s hard to pin down exactly what you’re looking for in a story, but when you were reading for Broad Knowledge and Sharp & Sugar Tooth, what were the kind of things that made you sit up and take notice?

OC: This is my first go at editing, so again my responses will be restricted to my experience with Sugar Tooth. Voice for me is a big one—as is having something to say. I wanted stories with a point, something with a bit of thought behind them. Something which engaged with the theme in an exciting and original way. I got sent a lot—a lot! —of stories about women eating their abusive husbands. It must have been nigh on 50% of submissions, and it got to the point where if meat was somehow mentioned in the first paragraph or two I knew what that meat was going to be. So yeah, originality was a big one. Another thing I wanted was something too that says to me that the author is familiar with short fiction being written today. I don’t want to be too specific about this as I don’t want to people to think I’m talking about their story specifically, but it’s very obvious if you’re writing about a speculative staple—robots, for instance, or aliens, or witches—and the all the robot or alien or witch stories you’ve read are 50 years old. I’m not saying don’t read the classics, because they’re a necessary foundation I think, but you risk dating your stories unnecessarily if you don’t read contemporary fiction in the genre you’re writing, because often the way we write about these things changes over time.

And it should go without saying but sadly doesn’t: stories that follow the guidelines. I wasn’t joking when I said I had no interest in stories about horrible violence against women, or child abuse, or anything like that but I still got bloody sent them. Don’t do that. It wins you no friends.

JM: I want to see an excellent facility with language on a sentence-level, combined with something that makes me say, “wow!”—whether that’s an original twist on a plot idea, or world-building I haven’t seen before, or a character who makes me fall in love. Like Octavia, I also notice if writers aren’t reading contemporary work, or the guidelines.

The thing that surprised me the most this time around was how angry my submitters were. Trump had just been elected, and compared to the submissions for Choose Wisely, we had many more submissions that were either overtly political (many of which we accepted) or straight-up revenge fantasies (which we didn’t).

You have an incredible line-up of authors for your anthologies. Once you have all your stories in place, whether solicited or submitted, how do you go about assembling your anthologies? Is there a certain balance or feel you’re looking to create? Have you ever found themes or conversations emerging among the stories that have surprised you?

JM: I try to balance the stories between genre (horror, science fiction, and fantasy) and feel (dark, light, serious, humorous, arch, and sincere). As a reader, I enjoy variety with some cohesion, so an anthology or collection hangs together but keeps surprising me, and so as an editor that’s what I strive for.

L. Timmel Duchamp’s “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.” was the genesis for Broad Knowledge. When I reread it, I was in the process of reading submissions for an unnamed anthology that wasn’t themed yet, with a co-editor who ended up having to drop out of the project due to some issues in her personal life, but who had solicited a few stories, like Angela Slatter’s, that already fit into the concept of a knowledge-focused anthology. Many of my favorites from the submissions also fit the theme, so I reconceptualized the anthology now that I would be editing it alone, and sent out a new call for submissions. Luckily, Duchamp allowed me to reprint her story. In a way, this whole anthology has been a surprise.

OC: I used post-its! Each post-it had the title, author, and word count of one particular story, and then they got stuck to my coffee table for several days as I moved them around and tried to decide line-up. The first and last stories in Sugar Tooth were very easy to pick: they were the two most unlike each other, I think. I arranged the rest of the stories to form a sort of journey—stories of similar themes got grouped together, for instance, and the scale of the story too was also a factor. The earlier stories are often focused more on a relationship between two people, for instance, while the last stories are more often focused at the level of relationships between ecosystems or species.

Could you talk a bit about your Kickstarter campaign, what you hope to accomplish, any cool reward levels you’d like to highlight, and any stretch goals you’d like to reach?

JM: My hope is that the series will become self-supporting after this, so that sales of the first three anthologies will fund the fourth, and so on. In terms of rewards, the best deal is the “Triple Ebooks” (all three anthologies for twenty bucks) and the coolest is probably the “Triple Paperbacks + Recommended Book,” where those who pledge get all three anthologies in paperback and also get to geek out with me or Octavia about books, after which we’ll send some (non-URB) paperbacks that we recommend based on our conversation. For stretch goals, if we reach $30,000, we’ll be able to immediately open to submissions from editors for ideas for a fourth Women Up To No Good anthology, and shortly thereafter, open to submissions for the best idea!

Any closing thoughts you’d like to share about Women Up to No Good, Upper Rubber Boot, the world in general, or other personal projects you’re working on you’d like folks to know about?

JM: Upper Rubber Boot is run in my spare time (I have a completely unrelated day job as a project manager at an academic hospital), so we don’t do too much at any one time. Right now, we only have one other big project: promoting solarpunk. Last August, we published the first general-interest solarpunk anthology in English, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, and including work by Elgin Award nominee Kristine Ong Muslim, James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner Nisi Shawl (who also has a story in Broad Knowledge), Jaymee Goh, Iona Sharma, and you! Now we’re co-hosting a monthly #SolarpunkChat on the third Saturday of every month, along with Reckoning Press, World Weaver Press, and a growing group of solarpunk enthusiasts.

Thank you both for dropping by! I can’t wait to see what the future of Women Up to No Good has in store!

Today, I’m very pleased to welcome the publisher of The Dark, who is currently wrapping up a Kickstarter campaign to publish even more excellent fiction, increase pay rates, publish a special double issue in December, and possibly even launch a regular podcast.

I’m Sean Wallace, co-editor and publisher for The Dark Magazine, and I work hand-in-hand with Silvia Moreno-Garcia to select and showcase great fiction every month. I’ve essentially been onboard since the first issue, so about five years now, and thirty-five issues later.

You launched The Dark in 2013, and you’ve been going strong for five years now. How did the idea or the vision for the publication originally come about? What’s changed between Issue 1 and Issue 35?

I would say not much has really changed, as the focus has always been on character-driven stories from all around the world, bringing unique mythologies, perspectives, and more, to the magazine. This is something to be proud of, as we have accomplished that to a large degree, with the help of Jack Fisher, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and many others. And last year was our best, yet, with over forty-percent of our authors being people of colo(u)r. We could always improve, though!

However, in other ways, The Dark has indeed evolved. For example, when we added the award-winning Kate Baker to our masthead, to narrate the occasional podcast adaptation throughout the year. There was also the time we dropped from four original stories down to two, and brought in two reprints instead. Or, over the years, opening up and exploring revenue streams by offering Patreon, Amazon subscriptions, and more. Publishing online is always a challenge, so we have to change, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.

As an editor, I know it’s sometimes hard to pin down exactly what you’re looking for in a story, but how would you generally characterize a story that has the right feel for The Dark? Is there anything you don’t see enough of in the submission pile that you’d like to see more often?

You have to remember that between Silvia and myself that we are pretty well read, with a combined thirty years of editing experience, so, honestly, what we react positively to basically boils down to: surprise us with something we haven’t seen before, right away, because you only get that one chance, for the most part. And since we process about three or hundred stories a month, that first paragraph really has to do the heavy lifting, almost always, in order to convince us to go any further.

Could you talk a bit about your Kickstarter campaign, what you hope to accomplish, and particularly the stretch goals you’d like to reach?

It takes time (and energy) to grow a magazine and make it sustainable. Ever since I bought The Dark entirely a few years ago, it has been resource-starved, in a number of ways. So we are hoping that the kickstarter campaign allows us a bit of breathing space to grow everything at a pace that we’re comfortable with, without worrying about the finances underpinning the entire business model. But, also, and just as important, we wanted to bump up the pay rate for our authors, to properly compensate them for the great work they do. We couldn’t do it without them.

With regards to stretch goals, the first is if we reach $13,500, it essentially boils down to having a podcast every month, instead of every other month. Why? Because people want to process their short fiction fix in a number of ways, not just online or in print, but also in audio. You have to go where the readers are, in this.

We also thought that an one-off Spanish-language edition might be really cool, to partially reflect the interest worldwide in our stories, so we mocked up the cover, came up with the title, La Oscuridad, and we really hope to get a chance to do this in time for World Fantasy this year. After all, there shouldn’t be any reason why there shouldn’t one, in a country where Hispanics and Latinos represent the largest ethnic / racial minority. So, in this, we need to do more.

And the second and last goal is for $15,000: at which point we increase the pay rate from five cents to six cents a word, making the magazine SFWA qualified. Which would make a lot of people very happy, including us!

You’ve worked as an co-editor elsewhere in addition to The Dark (Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and more). How have those experiences influenced (or not) the way you work with others on this publication?

I do think that working on all those other magazines has meant that I look at The Dark with a realistic perspective, knowing that I will lose money on the venture for the first two or three years, but with a game plan in mind to at least break-even or make some money down the road. Because, ultimately, there is nothing in this world I love more but publish short stories and have readers enjoy them as much as I do.

Beyond that the more I work at this, it is clear that I work best at co-editing, that it balances out my own editorial inclinations, which can be sometimes good or bad, really. And whether it is with Neil Clarke, Jack Fisher, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Cat Rambo, Paul Tremblay, or any others I’ve forgotten to list, they help me be better. As it really is a team effort.

Any closing thoughts you’d like to share about The Dark, the world in general, or other personal projects you’re working on you’d like people to know about?

Just to repeat what we stated on the campaign itself: we don’t just like dark fantasy, horror, or weird fiction . . . we love it. And we hope to keep doing it for years to come, with your help.

Thank you all for dropping by! I can’t wait to see what the future of The Dark has in store!

Today, I’m pleased to welcome Scott Gable, publisher of Broken Eye Books, and editor of many of their fine anthologies, including the upcoming Welcome to Miskatonic University.

Welcome, Scott! To start things off, would you care to introduce yourself and tell folks a bit about Broken Eye Books?

So great to be here! I run the indie press Broken Eye Books out of Seattle. We’ve been going for eight wonderful years, publishing the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. We love to blend genres and blur the boundaries of science fiction, fantasy, and the weird.

You’re currently running a Kickstarter for two volumes of Welcome to Miskatonic University. Could you give readers a taste of the sorts of stories they’ll find in its pages?

We asked authors to envision a modern-day Miskatonic University, that institution from the Cthulhu Mythos that always seemed to be at the center of all things strange and magical. And as we read through the slush, an interesting pattern developed. There was a shift in the types of stories we received that fell along a spectrum: on one end, the setting and mood of the weird fiction typified by Lovecraft and his contemporaries, albeit modern, and on the other end, we see where weird fiction starts to blend with other speculative genres (fantasy and science fiction, though largely fantasy in this case with stories more akin to Grossman’s The Magicians or a more adult Hogwarts). This was fascinating and presented a great opportunity to more deeply explore weird fiction’s relationship with other genres, so we split the project into two anthologies—the first consisting of the fantastically weird and the latter of the weirdly fantastic.

The first, Welcome to Miskatonic University, represents the first half of that spectrum. These are the tales with the unknown at their core, where relatively normal people in a relatively normal world come face to face with the unknown, and we get to see what happens. These are the stories most tightly anchored to our reality, to what we now. In the second, It Came from Miskatonic University, the setting and mood change a bit. And this isn’t a binary—not an either-or; it’s a spectrum with gradation in how these elements change. In these tales, that next layer of secrets have been stripped away. (It makes perfect sense that, after a century of uncovering secrets, a college might not be the same as it was.) In these tales, at least some of the unknown is stripped bare for the characters. This appears in two different ways: either 1) what was once unknown is now known from the start by either the main characters or the setting as a whole or 2) the protagonist is themself the “unknown,” being privy to the secrets—whether a Deep One trying to save her human girlfriend or a powerful sorcerer on a mission—and thereby becoming a direct window to that unknown for the reader. These are the lands where weird fiction blends with fantasy and science fiction. When the unknown has been revealed, accepted, and possibly even incorporated into the setting, we are flitting across weird fiction’s borders with other speculative fiction. And it makes sense that after some time at MU, as in the second anthology, you might learn a thing or two.

Past Broken Eye Books anthologies have explored Lovecraftian mythology in the future, and mashed up Lovecraft and space opera. This time around, you’ve asked authors to tell stories set in the modern day. What appeals to you about Lovecraftian mythology colliding with our current day world? Overall, what sparked the idea behind the anthology?

Well, there’s the easy answer that we just love mashing together two seemingly disparate things to get something hopefully greater than its parts. (That’s how you get peanut butter cups!) Before Tomorrow’s Cthulhu, for instance, we did the anthology Ghost in the Cogs, combining steampunk and the supernatural—which was crazy amounts of fun, by the way. So really, that ethos of experimental “what if we try this?” is very much a part of our books.

As for the Cthulhu Mythos, it’s always taunted me, from that first Del Rey collection that inaugurated me as a kid who liked weird fiction. I would be all “Yeah! And then what?” and always wanting more. The “terrible crushing dread of existence” didn’t have to end in the 1920s. Everyone at some point in their lives knows it’s still kicking around in their closet. So why not bring it into the modern world? And as a gamer, the Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green RPGs were already planting such wonderful seeds for how a modern Mythos might take shape.

As for the science fiction elements, there’s never really been a shortage of weird horror to go around, but it’s always felt that the weird science elements would get overshadowed by the supernatural. And to me, the two are both vital for weird fiction. “From Beyond” is one of my favorite highlights from the Mythos of weird science. These are those crazy, “misunderstood” experiments that start from scientific principles but quickly go off the rails into realms that science just has no answers for (like Frankenstein before it). That’s the key: it’s still unknown, the narrative just pokes that unknown with a “scientific” stick rather than a “supernatural” one.

As for the modern world, that’s where I live. I want stories that spin off from that world and with more relevance to the modern human condition, stories that shine a light on the unknowns of today and that embrace both the supernatural and the weird science. I want inclusive stories that represent our modern sensibilities, and I want to hear it from lots of different voices. I want all of us to be excited to explore and experiment, to take those bits we like and forge something unique and all our own.

If you were enrolling at Miskatonic University yourself, what courses would you be most interested in, or what would your major be? Would you try out for any sports? Join any clubs?

Tough call. I’ve always been torn between the sciences and the humanities. And though I’m sure I could fully redeem Tillinghast’s and West’s experiments—what could go wrong!—I would likely find myself drawn to library sciences, instructing students on the proper care and maintenance of those dangerous words. Books are a responsibility, you know, requiring a commitment of both time and intention, an understanding of the preventive safeguards and reparative ministrations for the physical and mental wellbeing of both you and them, and a dedication to their proper socialization and training and mental stimulation. Countless are those hurt by a book’s misuse.

And I would definitely take a yoga class, or tai chi. Something for stress management. (I wonder if there’s a non-Euclidean yoga?)

As part of the Kickstarter, you have some pretty awesome swag to offer including university bumper stickers, hand-bound books, and custom art. Could you talk a bit about the art and design aspect of the anthology, how you identify artists, and how you work with them to bring unique visions of the eldritch and squamous to life?

I have a big list of authors and artists I’m itching to work with. As I discover a person’s work, I often know immediately that they’d make a great fit for some project percolating in the gray matter—and often, I know exactly what I’d want them to work on. I find artists online and from their work on other books and games, but most notably, I find them at the conventions I attend. (I stumbled upon the cover artist for Pretty Marys All in a Row—gawki—for instance, at Emerald City Comic Con 2017. I enjoyed their work so much and knew they’d be a perfect match for the novella.)

For book covers, I generally try to have a very rough idea (or several possible ideas and often will chat with the author—for the single-author works—to get their feedback) of what I’m thinking about for a book so that the artist has something to latch onto and expand on. But I don’t want to tell these artists how to do their jobs, so I leave as much detail to them as they’re comfortable with. We typically go through a round of low-res mockups of possible ideas, and then once we’ve settled on something, I typically back away. They’re artists and know what they’re doing.

For the Kickstarter, I wanted to offer something special beyond the core books, and Near Mint (the bookbinder for the deluxe edition) and Merle Rice (creator of the fleece squid hats)—both local artists that I met at conventions—seemed a wonderful fit, as did Frank Casey who’s slated for the second anthology’s cover. And of course Yves Tourigny and Michael Bukowski I’ve worked with before on the Ride the Star Wind illustrations. And if we unlock that particular stretch goal, even more artists will be added.

And the bumper stickers are largely my own designs (with assistance from Jeremy Zerfoss and Michael Bukowski for some of the illustrations), and I’ve had a blast making them.

After Welcome to Miskatonic University, what’s next for Broken Eye Books? Any other upcoming projects you’d like folks to know about?

There are a couple novellas coming next that I’ve already announced and a couple that I haven’t. There’s also another novel slated for later this year along with a new publishing imprint. And of course, I wouldn’t be me without the next few anthologies in mind. Our online magazine Eyedolon will be the next big thing to watch from us as that’s where the next pebble drops.

We’re a small press, so we can adjust our course with relative ease, embracing the chaos of book publishing. But always spinning new tales and hopefully not taking ourselves too seriously.

Thank you for dropping by! I can’t wait to see the finished anthologies!